Starting with her first movie appearance, Meryl Streep showed audiences to be one
of the most remarkable actresses of her generation. Throughout her career,
she has shown an amazing range, both in comedy roles as well as heavy dramatic
parts, and is famous for
her ability to utilize foreign accents. Even before her teens, Streep
was studying classical voice. While in high school, she appeared in musicals
and went on to major in drama and English at Vassar. After working with a
traveling theater company, she enrolled at the Yale School of Drama.

After graduation, Meryl found a job with Joseph Papp's New
York Shakespeare Festival. In 1976, she appeared in "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" and "A Memory of Two
Mondays” where she received a Tony Award nomination as
Featured Actress in a Play. Other Broadway roles included three
Shakespeare in the Park performances including the part of Isabella in "Measure for
Measure" (1976), opposite John Cazale, and "The Taming of the
Shrew" (1978).

Meryl appeared
in the television movie "The Deadliest Season" (1977) as the wife of a
professional hockey player accused of manslaughter, and won an Emmy Award
as a Catholic women who marries into a Jewish family in the miniseries
"Holocaust" (1978). Streep took a small role as a sarcastic
friend of Jane Fonda's Lillian Hellman in "Julia" (1977), but it
was her role as Christopher Walken's girlfriend who learns
to stand up for herself in "The Deer Hunter" (1978), starring Robert
De Niro, that made critics
and audiences notice her.

The next year, Streep took three high profile roles. First, as the
bitter lesbian
ex-wife of Woody Allen in "Manhattan”, then as the Southern mistress of Alan
Alda's juvenile politician in "The Seduction of Joe Tynan", and
finally, as the
unhappy wife of Dustin Hoffman in "Kramer vs. Kramer.” The actress walked off with an Academy Award as Best
Supporting Actress for the film.

Moving into starring roles, Meryl Streep showed her skill for accents in the role of actress in "The French
Lieutenant's Woman" (1981). Next she gave what is thought to be one of
her best roles - the Polish
concentration camp survivor in "Sophie's Choice”, where she was painfully
realistic. For her performance, she won the Best
Actress Oscar.

Streep then played a blue-collar whistle-blower in "Silkwood"
(1983), and the British woman who had been a Resistance worker in "Plenty" (1985), and
gave another powerful performance in "Out of
Africa" (1985). Meryl did well against Jack
Nicholson as the discarded and pregnant wife out for revenge in
"Heartburn" (1986), and as an alcoholic in
"Ironweed" (1987). "Evil Angels"
(1988) cast her as Lindy Chamberlain, whose assertion that a
dingo took her baby made her the most criticized woman in Australia.

Streep next was cast as a singer and
actress dealing with an arrogant movie-star mother and other addictions
in the film version of Carrie Fisher's "Postcards From the
Edge" (1990). While she has admits that the movie had some rough edges,
"Death Becomes Her" (1992) with Bruce
Willis gave her a chance to joke about Hollywood's youth obsessed culture as she
played an aging, egotistical actress
who will do anything to keep her beauty.

Streep turned herself into an action hero with "The River Wild"
(1994) with Kevin Bacon
and Benjamin Bratt, but found greater fortune with the role
of the Italian housewife who has a love affair with a
photographer in Clint Eastwood's film "The Bridges of
Madison County" (1995). She worked well with co-stars Diane
Keaton, Robert De Niro
and Leonardo DiCaprio
in "Marvin's Room" (1996), about a leukemia patient who attempts
to end a 20-year feud with her sister to get her bone marrow.

Returning to the television, Meryl Streep appeared in the television movie
"First Do No Harm" (1997), before taking the role of a
journalist's sick mother in "One True Thing", then using
an Irish accent as the oldest sister in "Dancing at
Lughnasa" (1998). The following year, she won another Best
Actress Oscar nomination for her role as real-life New York City music teacher
Roberta Guaspari-Tzavaras in "Music of
the Heart”, the story of a schoolteacher's struggle to teach violin to
inner-city Harlem kids.

The actress then took a two-year vacation from Hollywood,
appearing briefly as the voice of the Blue Mecha in director Steven Spielberg's
"A.I. Artificial Intelligence" with Jude
Law. But she made a big return in
2002, appearing in the film "Adaptation" with Nicolas
Cage, as
real-life writer Susan Orlean, author of the best-selling novel "The
Orchid Thief", who in a thrilling mess of truth and fiction becomes the
object of the obsessions of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman played by Nicolas
Cage.

Meryl then followed
with
a role in the modern day segment of "The Hours" with Nicole
Kidman, playing book editor and troubled lesbian Clarissa Vaughn planning a
good-bye party for her AIDS stricken former lover, a famous author who
had nicknamed her "Mrs. Dalloway.” Her performance helped the movie succeed.

Streep next appeared in the 2003 miniseries "Angels in America,"
opposite Al Pacino and Emma Thompson. Her work won her an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress
in a Miniseries or a Movie, and a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an
Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television.

Streep then took on a very challenging role, the remake of the 1962 conspiracy thriller "The Manchurian
Candidate" (2004) with Denzel
Washington, where in the midst of the Gulf War, soldiers are kidnapped
and brainwashed for sinister purposes.

In a more comedic role, she was perfect as the mystified Aunt Josephine in the children's tale "Lemony Snicket's A Series of
Unfortunate Events" (2004) with Jim
Carrey and Jude Law, and she
showed her comedy skills again in "Prime" (2005) as therapist Lisa Metzger, whose
gorgeous but relationship challenged patient (Uma
Thurman) strikes up a stimulating love affair that she talks about in detail,
with a much-younger.

Streep then appeared in
Garrison Keillor's radio show "A Prairie Home
Companion" (2006) with Lindsay
Lohan, where she plays country music siren Yolanda Johnson.

Next was
the movie "The Devil
Wears Prada" (2006) with Anne
Hathaway and Heidi Klum,
as the privileged, arrogant and tough New York magazine
editor Miranda Priestly. Her performance won her award nominations and
wins, including her sixth Golden Globe. Meryl went on to earn another
Academy Award nomination, joining Penelope
Cruz, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren
and Kate Winslet in the Best Actress category.

Meryl Streep was now a certified Hollywood celebrity and every movie producer wanted her in their movies!

Streep next ventured into animated voice work with "The Ant Bully"
(2006) with other celebrity voiced characters from Nicolas
Cage and Julia Roberts in the story about Lucas Nickle, who floods an ant colony with his water gun
and is magically shrunken down to insect size and sentenced to hard labor in
the ruins. She then starred in the dramatic movie "Dark Matter"
(2007), based on actual events, where a Chinese university student responds
violently when his chances for a Nobel Prize are dashed by school politics.

Then Meryl starred with Claire
Danes in the romantic drama "Evening" (2007), a drama
exploring the romantic past and emotional present of Ann Grant and her
daughters. She then teamed with Jake
Gyllenhaal and Reese
Witherspoon in the dramatic thriller "Rendition" (2007), about
a CIA analyst who questions his assignment after witnessing an unorthodox
interrogation at a secret detention facility outside the United States. Streep wrapped
her year with the thriller "Lions for Lambs" (2007) with
Robert Redford and Tom
Cruise, where injuries received by two Army ranger behind enemy lines
in Afghanistan set off a sequence of events involving a congressman, a
journalist and a professor.

The year 2008 proved to be a good year for the actress, staring with Pierce
Brosnan in the musical comedy "Mamma Mia!" (2008), the story
of a bride-to-be trying to find her real father told using hit songs by the
popular 1970's group ABBA. Next was the dramatic "Doubt" (2008), set
in 1964, the plot centers on a nun who confronts a priest after
suspecting him abusing a black student.

Meryl Streep wrapped the year with the
biographical drama "Julie & Julia" (2009), a film that follows
a government employee who decides to cook her way through legendary cook
Julia Child's classic cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French
Cooking" in one year's time out of her small Queens kitchen.

In 2012, Streep won an Academy Award for her role as Margaret
Thatcher in the Phyllida Lloyd drama “The Iron Lady”. The movie was an
emotional look at the life of Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom, with a focus on the price she paid for
power.

Also in 2012, Streep took the role of Maeve Soames in the movie “Great
Hope Springs” alongside Steve Carell and Tommy Lee Jones, where after
thirty years of marriage, a middle-aged couple attends an intense
counseling weekend to decide the fate of their marriage.